Geocaching in Shropshire and beyond…

Winter caching near Coventry and then Hockley Heath

After all the over-indulgences of the Christmas period, myself and Isaac were keen to get out on a good walk to not only get some fresh air, but work off some of the above excesses.

A new series just to the west of Coventry looked to be getting good logs and looked a nice walk so we settled on that as the target for the day. We knew this would not take us all day so spotted loads of caches near Hockley Heath (where the M40 meets the M42) which looked like they might keep us occupied for the rest of the day.

Isaac directed us to the suggested parking for the Coventry caches, at the southern end of the walk. The walk consisted of starting off on the Peppa Pig Trail before joining up with the adjacent George Pig Trail and then finally finishing off the rest of the Peppa Pig Trail caches on the way back to where we’d parked. The George series were all stand alone caches but the Peppa series involved collecting visual clues at various parts of the walk, which then lead you to a bonus cache.

We set off on our walk and had a series of easy finds. One had a dog poo bag right on top of the cache sticks, which was nice (not!). Pity the lazy dog owners don’t take their rubbish home with them rather than hiding then in tree roots – who in their right minds would hide something in the roots of a tree in the middle of nowhere anyway ;-).

Part way round the series we joined up with the George series and set off to loop round them. Lots more easy finds followed, with the main thing of note being that we recognised part of the walk from a puzzle cache we’d done in the area absolutely ages ago. We actually walked past the puzzle cache hiding place and had a quick look to check on it. It was not there and we now know it’s been archived for quite a while as someone had changed the combination on the padlock on the cache box, so even the cache owner had to break into the box!

Soon we were joining back up with the Peppa series and calculating the bonus co-ords. We plotted these and realised they were on the way back to the Jeep (how handy!) and there was another, un-related, cache we could grab on the way past.

Once back at the Jeep, we headed off for the next set of caches near Hockley Heath. It did not look far on the map but seemed to take an age to drive to. Luckily time was on our side so far today :-).

Once in Hockley Heath, Isaac took us to a quick drive-by before a short walk to a cache at the side of a very ornate garden with a big house in the distance. The cache was called ‘Dragons Den’ and it’s obvious someone with too much spare cash lives there, but I suspect it’s not a Dragon. Whoever it is has very questionable taste as the whole garden looked just a little big tacky to us. Each to their own though – it would be a boring world if we all liked the same things.

Next on the list was a cache down a green lane. Perfect for a drive-by in the Jeep. I’d not have wanted to try this in a non-4×4 though as the lane was pretty muddy and had HUGE potholes to navigate over.

We enjoyed this so much we headed straight for another set of caches along another green lane. We’d driven down this lane for a puzzle cache ages ago (I won’t say which one as I don’t want to spoil it for others) so knew it was passable. All nice easy finds with some really fun, if not a bit scary 😉 containers.

Just time for a few more caches before it goes dark, but we’ve almost run out of ones to do around here. A quick check on Memory Map showed us there were lots we could try to the west of the M42 near Earlswood. This is an area we’ve cached in many times before and we’ve always enjoyed the caches there.

We were soon parking up for a quick drive-by on a lane we’re sure we’ve done a previous cache on – the lane was called Lime Kiln Lane and I’m sure the cache was something like ‘Tutti Fruitti – Lime’.

Next stop was Earlswood Reservoir. The sun was just going down over the far end of the reservoir now and the sky was awash with purples, crimsons and yellows. An absolutely spectacular sight, so I took some photos whilst Isaac did the biz with the nearby cache.

Last of the day was a walk down a PF with 6 more Max caches on them. Max is a caching hound (I think) and seems to have hidden fun caches all over this area – that’s our kind of dog :-). All were nice easy finds, even though it had now gone fully dark.

We decided to head off to the motorway and homewards, but spotted a quick The Strangler drive-by just before we got onto the motorway. How could we resist?

37 finds for the day, some great walking, some really good green lanes and a thoroughly enjoyable time was had by both of us for our first caching of 2010 :-).

Share this:

Like this:

Related

3 Responses

Caching greetings from New Zealand!!
That sounds like a great day’s caching – 37 caches on a short winter’s day! You’ve done well. Great sunset photos too – and I can see in the other photos that it’s not quite snowing in your area?

The snow was not too bad while out caching last week but I suspect it’s a lot worse in that area this week. We’ve hardly done any caching this weekend as I could not get motivated to go out for long in the snow.